560 applicants for 27 places: the watch trade's arithmetic problem

§1A retailer builds a workshop.

Matthew Burdeen, chief executive of Burdeen's Jewelry in Chicago, told Watch Insider on 14 August that the shortage of qualified watchmakers is the industry's central structural problem, and the Centurion carried the account on 18 August. "It is probably one of the biggest structural problems in the watch industry," he said. His firm's answer is a 7,000 square foot facility for watchmaking, service and operations, due in 2027. Burdeen's argument is that intake is barely replacing retirement while the installed base of watches needing service keeps growing, and that brands and retailers, not schools alone, have to fund the training and build the career path.

The training arithmetic is where the claim becomes checkable. Rolex's Watchmaking Training Center in Dallas took 27 students from more than 560 applicants in 2024, a figure Fortune reported and the Centurion cites, which is one place for every 20.7 applicants on this desk's arithmetic. North Seattle College's Watch Technology Institute accepts an average of 10 to 12 students a year on an eight-quarter certificate. Those two schools together admit fewer people in a year than a mid-sized jewellery chain employs at one store. The institute's own employment page returned a 403 to this desk today, so its outcome figures are carried from the trade press rather than verified at source, and the figures in circulation measure two different things: 87% employment for graduates over five years of cohorts, and a 91% completion rate. This desk prints neither as settled.

§2The population behind the ratio.

The population figures behind it are older and larger. Watch Insider's February 2026 study of the same shortage put roughly 44,000 qualified watchmakers in the United States in 1953, on Department of Labor and American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute records, against about 6,500 in 2021 on Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. That is a fall of 85.2% across 68 years, on this desk's arithmetic. Jason Champion of the AWCI put the current imbalance at a ratio of at least ten employers seeking a watchmaker for every watchmaker seeking work. Switzerland's own employers' convention has been working to a need for roughly 4,000 additional watchmakers. None of those three figures is dated 2026, and all three are the most recent this desk could source.

§3The number nobody publishes.

What nobody publishes is the number that would settle the argument: the service backlog. Alistair Audsley of the Alliance of British Watch and Clockmakers has described repair waits stretching into years at some facilities, and framed the consequence as service deserts across the physical scale of the United States. But a wait reported as hearsay is not a measured queue. No brand publishes median turnaround for a service centre, no trade body publishes an aggregate backlog, and until one does, the shortage is argued from intake numbers and job ratios rather than from the thing customers actually experience. That is why a retailer building a 7,000 square foot workshop is a more useful data point than any of the estimates above.